Our Gods are not idols upon the mantel. Our Gods are no objects of reverence, our Gods are not subject to speculation or debate or revision. Our Gods do not subsist on worship, our Gods do not insist upon worship, our Gods haven't use for such things. Our Gods are not to be trifled with.

This has always been the state of our Gods. They are not your gods, no, one is unlike the other in every imaginable way. You worship and revere and make idols of your gods as though the sum of your efforts might satisfy them into being, might manifest the form you envision from the quagmire into which you project all your lusting voices. Our Gods had their form from the beginning, unchanged for all the time that was theirs, and this form was beyond our imagining, and so it could not be the product of our lust for them. Our Gods had no form to fill the bleakness of our minds until they were presented here before us.

Your gods are as recluses, apart from you where they squabble in the heavens. Our Gods split the heavens to join us here. Your gods, from their vague heavenly pulpit, whisper assurances of their presence and their breadth and their intent into the ears of those who seek aggrandizement and those who seek not but for a remedy to their madness. To the sane and the mad alike, Our Gods present themselves and speak frankly.

Our Gods are not idols upon the mantel, and their purposes we have not ascribed to them. Our Gods are no objects of reverence, but act in every accordance with those who would seek it. Our Gods do not subsist on worship, it is implicit unto them, Our Gods do not insist upon worship, they denounce it, for our Gods haven't use for such things.

Our Gods revealed themselves to us twenty generations in the past. Birth and age and death were as the stick beside which time's passage might be guessed, for before we knew Our Gods, we knew no better way.

When Our Gods descended in a froth from the chasm they imposed by their will upon the solid heavens, they brought with them a clock, and they offered it tenderly, for measuring time in the old way would not again be possible, so said they. This message they relayed in our own language, this they told as we tell, this they announced as symbols carved into the icy face of heaven, with grace, and with deftness, and with a learnedness such that we might be forgiven for assuming they had devised our language and bestowed it upon us, and not the reverse.

This clock they gave us, Our Gods, and briefly we did not see the value. Always have we measured time in generations lived and dead, in the frequency of death, in the quantity of mothers and fathers and their mothers and their fathers who had lost the adhesion of life and so sank away from the solid heavens to mingle with the eeriness below.

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Why need we such a thing, heavenly Gods?

This we asked with no concept of whom it was that received us. This we asked with no concept of the affront which lesser gods, your gods, would known in hearing it. Our Gods received our ignorance with humility and with understanding, and their answer was to us not less than a miracle to you; only, your miracles are matters of reverent speculation and childish wishfulness, and your gods are fickle. Our miracles are matters of fact, and Our Gods deliver.

This clock is yours so that you should not ever lose your sense of time, nor with it your sense of progress. The clock is yours so that you do not disorient yourselves in this disorienting world, so that the past remain behind you and the future before, so that you may join us at your leisure in the place where up is up and down is down.

This Our Gods said to us. And to Our Gods, because we did not yet regard them for the perfect creatures they were, and because even now our reverence is not imposed and so has not soured into that fear which all that bow to lesser gods know, we said:

You misunderstand us. We ask, why need we such a thing, heavenly Gods, when we know all that you insist we know by the perishing of our elders upon the face of the heavens? Why need we such a thing when counting time is counting the bodies of our ancestors who descend from the plain of life into the eeriness that reigns thereafter?

Our Gods took no offense to our ignorance. Instead they took pity, though it might have been mercy, and I think it was love.

There was a time when we, too, measured time by the wilting of our numbers in death. But then we built the clock, and perhaps we discovered it, and then there was one reason fewer to tolerate death at all. Now we know by a glance at the clock, and perhaps with gratitude to it, that death is no tool, no, but a thing of the past. So it will be for you.

Our Gods learned our language, so that we need not dedicate eternity to parsing their tongue from the randomness for a chance to hear their wisdom.

What language do your gods speak?

Our Gods bestowed upon us a name, like heavenly mothers they named us, with respect and appreciation and with love and with deference they called us Europans.

What name do your gods call you?

Our Gods announced themselves plainly and openly, as a helpful traveler announces himself to a land in desperate need of the abundance on his back, and with honesty and forthrightness and with love and with deference they called themselves Humans.

What name do you call your gods?

Our Gods expended their sweat and risked their flesh to pay us visit in our lowly hovels, to deliver us from death and shepherd us from darkness and show us that the heavens were not so solid as we thought. This they did before our very eyes, not as idols upon the mantel, but as Gods unto the world.

Where are yours?